ELGIN – With an expansive quarry operation encompassing one square mile, keeping inventory of their enormous aggregate stockpile requires a lot of work. The burdensome and time-consuming task is now a cinch, thanks to the use of drone technology.
Cory Shreffler, Dolese’s engineering director, and Kermit Frank, vice president of Dolese’s Communications and Community Relations, invited a Southwest Ledger reporter and photographer to tour “the pit” and demonstrate what drones can accomplish for the company and its customers.
Shreffler explained that drones allow for more frequent and efficient mine and stockpile data collection, which is more economically sound, compared with contracting an airplane to do the same aerial imagery.
Dolese, the company representatives noted, uses drone technology in the aggregate industry to survey and monitor stockpile inventory, design layout for new plant construction, plan mine exploration, sand and stone mining reserves and more, improving inventory consistency and the company’s final balance sheets.
Normally, Dolese uses two DJI drones navigated by FAA-licensed pilots from Dolese’s Quality Control LAN and Engineering department. Shreffler demonstrated a drone for our observation – here, 150 feet above the pit’s distinctive blue waters and layered limestone.
Mining and excavating of the Richards Spur site has turned up fossils that triggered the interest of geologists and archaeologists over the years, many connected with the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman. This site produces three million tons of rock a year, according to Shreffler.
“Yeah, and I think at our peak it was near five million,” added Shreffler, noting it is one of the biggest quarries in the country.
He took the drone out of its protective case kept in the back of a pickup truck and assembled it quickly. With a laptop, Shreffler typed a few instructions and the uncanny drone – behaving in an almost “biological” way – already knew how far to fly, what to monitor and photograph as it utilized the Kespry cloud interface between Shreffler and the drone, computing the volume of aggregate piles on the property. It also uses AutoCAD for construction layout and maps involved in the drone and Kespry software includes topographic, high-definition imagery and heat maps which display elevation.
“It flies itself,” Shreffler said as the buzzing drone set its camera on the four of us on the ground. The drone, he added, can fly for about 25 minutes before requiring a charge.
At one point, the drone was several hundred feet in the air and was lost in the low-hanging cloud cover.
Oklahoma’s sky is quite friendly toward the use of drones, as a recent study noted that the Sooner State was ranked the third most drone-friendly state in the United States due to the airspace lease law, law vesting air rights with landowners and a drone task force within the Oklahoma Department of Transportation.
In the old days, Frank noted, workers would use tape measures to calculate inventory. This new technology is far more exact, because, as Shreffler noted, missing 20,000 tons of product, for instance, can have real negative “balance sheet implications.”
Additionally, when needed, it can use various video editing software for media purposes, or, strictly, in-house, as Frank noted.
Frank, who has been with the company for nearly four decades, offered a little history of Dolese by explaining that the company got its start in Chicago with a few quarries and lots of crushed rock.
“We’ve been here since at least 1907 in this location,” he said of the Richards Spur location which mines the limestone to manufacture construction aggregate used in concrete and asphalt.
When asked what Dolese wants the public to know about this and their other quarries, Frank replied, “The useful nature of crushed stone. Literally, it’s the foundational material for nearly everything we know as infrastructure: roads, streets, bridges, our homes. So, without crushed stone you don’t have a modern society.”
LONG HISTORY
In the late 19th century, the Dolese family – led by patriarch John Dolese – began a contracting company with quarries that crushed rock to build the streets of Chicago. As the calendar turned into the first years of the 20th century, Dolese’s sons took over and contracted with railroads contributing toward Westward Expansion.
When the Richards Spur quarry began, Dolese Bros. had acquired leases from the Comanche Nation. Subsequently, the company created eight quarries and had sand plants. The rock and sand would then be shipped by rail to cities like Oklahoma City – where the company was eventually headquartered – for various building and infrastructure purposes.
This innovative drone technology is being utilized by Dolese not only at Richards Spur but at all of its quarries, enabling the company to safely, effectively and efficiently monitor and map its vast stockpiles of quarried rock and stone.
Dolese Bros. operates quarries located in Ardmore, Davis, Drumright, Hartshorne, Mountain View, Pawnee, Ponca City, Roosevelt as well as others across the state.
Of the 1,030 Dolese employees companywide, 80 men and women work at the Richards Spur quarry.
Frank said as people are wanting more accountability and transparency from corporations and industries, Dolese Bros. Co. invites the public to know more about the quarries and sites. Dolese also invites interested parties to schedule tours of the facilities.
For more information, go to www.dolese.com.